Alexandra Kollontai & Pussy Riot

I know the Pussy Riot story is just about played out, but I wanted to thank Roberto for sending a link to this Philip Jenkins column, which is the best thing I’ve seen yet explaining how very, very different PR’s desecration of Christ the Saviour Cathedral looks through Russian eyes. Excerpt:

Look, above all, at the site of the demonstration. Historically, Christ the Saviour was a central shrine both of the Orthodox faith and of Russian national pride, and for that reason, the Bolsheviks targeted it for destruction. In 1931, in a notorious act of cultural vandalism, the Soviet government dynamited the old building, levelling it to the ground, and replacing it with a public swimming pool. Not until 1990 did a new regime permit a rebuilding, funded largely by ordinary believers, and the vast new structure was consecrated in 2000. The cathedral is thus a primary memorial to the restoration of Russia’s Christianity after a savage persecution.

It’s difficult, perhaps, for Westerners to realize how bloodthirsty that government assault was. Russia in 1917 was overwhelmingly Orthodox, and in fact was undergoing a widespread religious revival. Rooting out that faith demanded forceful action by the new Bolshevik government, which had no scruples about imposing its will on the wishes of a vast majority. Government leaders like Alexandra Kollontai – the self-proclaimed Female Antichrist – illegally seized historic churches and monasteries, and used soldiers to suppress the resulting demonstration. Hundreds were killed in those actions alone.

Through the 1920s, the Bolsheviks systematically wiped out the church’s leaders. Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev perished in 1918, shot outside the historic Monastery of the Caves, while Bishop Hermogenes of Tobolsk was drowned in a Siberian river. Archbishop Andronicus of Perm was killed the following year, followed by most of his clergy. In 1920, Bishop Joachim of Nizhni Novgorod was crucified upside down from the iconostasis in his cathedral. In 1922, a firing squad executed the powerful Benjamin, Metropolitan of Petrograd/St Petersburg. The repression was indiscriminate, paying no attention to the victims’ records as critics of Tsarist injustice and anti-Semitism.

Persecution claimed many lives at lower levels of the church, among ordinary monks and priests. We hear of clergy shot in their hundreds, buried alive, mutilated, or fed to wild animals. Local Red officials hunted down priests as enthusiastically as their aristocratic predecessors had pursued wolves and wild boar. The number of clergy killed for their faith ran at least into the tens of thousands, with perhaps millions more lay believers.

The regime also rooted up the churches and monasteries that were the heart of Russian culture and spiritual life. Officials wandered the country, vandalizing churches, desecrating saints’ shrines and seizing church goods, and murdering those who protested the acts. Militant atheist groups used sacred objects to stage anti-religious skits and processions. Between 1927 and 1940, active Orthodox churches all but vanished from the Russian Republic, as their numbers fell from 30,000 to just 500.

In the process of dechristianization, the crowning act came in 1931 with the obliteration of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

Read the whole thing. You tell me how sympathetic the West would be if far-right provocateurs staged an anti-Israeli protest inside a rebuilt synagogue in Berlin.

Love with its many disappointments, with its tragedies and eternal demands for perfect happiness still played a very great role in my life. An all-too-great role! It was an expenditure of precious time and energy, fruitless and, in the final analysis, utterly worthless. We, the women of the past generation, did not yet understand how to be free. The whole thing was an absolutely incredible squandering of our mental energy, a diminution of our labor power which was dissipated in barren emotional experiences. It is certainly true that we, myself as well as many other activists, militants and working women contemporaries, were able to understand that love was not the main goal of our life and that we knew how to place work at its center. Nevertheless we would have been able to create and achieve much more had our energies not been fragmentized in the eternal struggle with our egos and with our feelings for another. It was, in fact, an eternal defensive war against the intervention of the male into our ego, a struggle revolving around the problem-complex: work or marriage and love? We, the older generation, did not yet understand, as most men do and as young women are learning today, that work and the longing for love can be harmoniously combined so that work remains as the main goal of existence. Our mistake was that each time we succumbed to the belief that we had finally found the one and only in the man we loved, the person with whom we believed we could blend our soul, one who was ready fully to recognize us as a spiritual-physical force.

Kollontai left her husband and her child to work full-time for the Revolution. It’s interesting to see how much staying power her ideas have had.

This is over the horizon into the Second Millenium, (or sesquennium), but I took MH’s advice and read the Forbes post. Its a good critique, EXCEPT when he implies that its fair game to disrupt services in either churches or mosques, and PR should be freed at once.

1) Punishment of blasphemy by The State is anathema to free exercise of religion or nonestablishment.

2) People who meet in churches, synagogues, or mosques are entitled to have trespassers removed, and to the protection of laws against disorderly conduct, assault, etc., no matter what religion is being blasphemed in the process.

As for burning crosses and states of mind, nobody who ever made a serious layman’s study of the law, let along those who went to law school, could be unaware that “state of mind” is a legitimate legal issue, although the rules of evidence for establishing it are rather strict, when they are strictly applied.

In the context of post-Civil-War USA, burning a cross on someone’s private property, or in front of their home, is a well understood threat of violence, and act of intimidation.

In 18th century Scotland, it was a call for the clans (not Klans) to gather and march off to war. That might be loyal service or treason, depending on whether one is Stuart or Whig in sympathies, and whether the clan gathering is Stuart or Campbell. Not an issue in 20th or 21st century USA.

From all reports, Pussy Riot didn’t use any historical symbols of any historical violent hate groups, such as swatzikas or burning crosses or sickle and hammer, etc. In fact, their protest included a prayer to the Virgin Mary to purify the Church, not a prayer to Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mao or the communist party. So the link to those who have murdered and suppressed the Orthodox Church is based entirely on the fact that they protested within an Orthodox Church. As if past atrocities against a religious group give that group immunity from any protest against its own sins.

It would be as if anyone protesting the actions of the state of Israel were associated with Hitler and the Nazis. No one would ever do that….oh wait.

I won’t claim to have made a serious layman’s study of law and I do know that mental states are factored into charges. I don’t have an issue when it is related to issues like premeditation for various degrees of murder or something similar.

My issue is specific to the freedom of conscience aspects of hate crimes. If their hate motivates a crime, it will likely be a well understood crime. For example the Sikh temple shooter may have hated non-whites, but there are already laws against mass murder. Conversely the Westboro Baptist Church obviously hates people, but they are fairly law abiding about their hatred.

Church Lady PR also swore at God, violated several minor taboos and a major one by doing this at all. It was hardly a simple prayer to the virgin.

What connects them to the Communists is that they chose the site of a Communist atrocity to do this stunt. It would be like protesting Likud’s policies at Dachau. People would connect your protest with the Nazis whether you mentioned them or not.

I will grant that it’s possible that it did not occur to PR that by choosing that particular church they’d be invoking memories of bolshevik atrocities.

“In 18th century Scotland, it was a call for the clans (not Klans) to gather and march off to war. That might be loyal service or treason, depending on whether one is Stuart or Whig in sympathies, and whether the clan gathering is Stuart or Campbell. Not an issue in 20th or 21st century USA.”

It occurred to me to mention this difference as well. Though I would have to add as a Campbell ANYTIME we were gathering we were probably about to commit treason or some other villainy.

I presume PR did not hurt God. (I suspect God is more offended when the anti-Semites of the Russian extreme right use religious imagery) They didn’t hurt Putin or Kirill. This is has never been about that.

I do think they traumatized the old women selling candles and caused harm to the other worshipers there. To a lesser degree I think their actions are offensive enough to ordinary Russians to qualify as “fighting words” .

I think the 2 years is too long to be justice, but it might be long enough to be a deterrent. Judging from their actions up until now it appears they’ve been trying to get arrested for a while. They got a highly publicized trial, got to make an eloquent argument in their defense, and are suddenly world famous. Not such a bad deal for them.

Hopefully Putin will grant them a pardon in a few months, although when asked about that they said “to hell with his pardons!”.

I have zero faith in the Russian judiciary btw, but I am not scandalized by the two years. They could have got 7 years. (And like I said before right now they’re not going to be safe on the streets of Moscow.)

“What connects them to the Communists is that they chose the site of a Communist atrocity to do this stunt. It would be like protesting Likud’s policies at Dachau. People would connect your protest with the Nazis whether you mentioned them or not.”

SInce the communists targeted virtually every Russian Church, it would be hard to find one that wasn’t targeted. That doesn’t make it a Dachau. This wasn’t an execution site. ANd let’s be clear, the communists targeted everyone not just the Orthodox Church. If Pussy Riot had been around then, the Communists would have thrown them in the Gulag also. So it’s utterly specious to associate PR with the Communists or their crimes. Everyone in Russia was a victim of those thugs. It doesn’t make the OC immune to criticism for its current cozying up to the new authoritarian tyrant, Putin, who was also of course a leading Communist KGB official, the very people who were responsible for the crimes against the OC.

What’s really galling is that the OC cozying up to Putin would be akin to Jewish religious leaders cozying up to former Nazis and concentration camp officials and endorsing their rule.

Update Junly 2013: desecration with green-splatter paint of the national Cathedral in Washington is not being met with toleration, but prosecution. Any bets that the punishment meted out won’t exceed what ‘Pussy Riot” got?